Less Trolling, More Governing, Please

P . J. O’Rourke famously dubbed Congress a parliament of whores; Jonah Goldberg calls today’s crew a parliament of pundits. I’d say Congress is at risk of becoming a parliament of trolls. Ted Cruz grilled then–Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson by soliciting her opinion on dumb ideas in woke children’s books; Josh Hawley pursued a child-porn line of questioning that was “meritless to the point of demagoguery,” according to my colleague Andy McCarthy; and Tom Cotton tied Jackson to Nazi lawyers. Cruz, during the hearings, was observed checking Twitter to see if anyone was talking about him.

But the Senate is set up to be a blowhard rodeo, a coven of chatterboxes. Senators rarely legislate. Mostly they bloviate. It has ever been so. And the last time the Democrats opposed a Supreme Court nominee, in 2018, they were far more embarrassing than the Republicans were this year.

Governors, though? Governors are chief executives. They don’t just vote on things, they run them. Yet we’re seeing some governors making strange and alarming moves toward pure theater. To prove he was macho about immigration, Greg Abbott of Texas enacted for eight days a policy of dual inspections on vehicles crossing the border and turned up nothing much while causing miles-long backups and hundreds of millions in losses as produce rotted in trucks. The state agriculture commissioner called the Abbott delays “catastrophic.”

In Florida, Ron DeSantis has proved himself an able leader through the Covid crisis, reopening the economy and the schools in the summer of 2020 and out-muscling the education establishment to prohibit forced masking of schoolchildren anywhere in the state a year later. I’ve been to Florida many times in the past couple of years, and each time I return home to New York it’s like checking into a mental hospital. I’d happily vote for DeSantis should he run for president. I’d fill in that oval so hard I’d drill a hole clean through to the table below it.

But is Florida’s parental-rights law a great idea? I’m not sure. I strongly support the underlying principle, but the statute is broadly worded. Yes, we need to worry about whether teachers are steering students toward gender dysphoria, and yes, now is the time to take action to make sure such teaching doesn’t become widespread. And yes, teachers should teach age-appropriate material. But if they don’t, parents should be able to . . . sue the schools? That strikes me as using a howitzer on a housefly. The law does not strike me as bigoted, but on the other hand, if a reasonable gay conservative such as Jamie Kirchick says it is, that gives me pause. I hope DeSantis isn’t writing off gay voters. “Inclusivity” may be the kind of word that makes conservatives roll our eyes, but isn’t it just another way of saying “big tent”? We want to compete for every vote. And there are a lot of gay people out there.

Questionable as the law is, though, it seems to be popular, and it can always be tweaked later if it doesn’t work as designed. At any rate, the controversy surrounding it was dying down. Disney, after unwisely speaking out against it, clammed up. At that point DeSantis should have heeded the ancient wisdom of Socrates, who famously said: Take the W, bro. (Socrates’s writings do not survive, so prove me wrong.) Yet he didn’t stop there.

I enjoy a good flex, dunk, or own more than most people. But I’m a writer. I’m paid to be snappy, not to actually do anything important. My household budget, unlike Florida’s, is not $112 billion.

Simply mentioning the possibility of punishing Disney for its remarks on the parental-rights law by dissolving the independent special district created for Disney in 1967 was an epic troll. And that’s where the matter should have ended. Instead, DeSantis and the Republican Florida legislature egged each other on like teen boys playing “I dare you,” a game that tends to begin with somebody balancing a shot glass on somebody’s head and ends in the emergency room.

Being uninformed on the subject, I have no opinion on whether it’s time to end the Reedy Creek Improvement District that allows Disney to mostly self-govern in the Disney World area, but working for the government for two years (the part of it where you wear baggy green uniforms and learn to shoot people) turned me into a conservative who thinks private industry is almost always better at managing stuff than government. Disney World, notably, is one of the best-run places on earth. Maybe sometimes you can mess with success, but you’d better have a good reason, along with a plan that is going to lead to even more success.

Yet DeSantis and Co., with no plan whatsoever, wiped out Reedy Creek with a hissy-fit stroke of the pen and gave themselves a year to figure out what might replace it. They clearly did this in retaliation for Disney’s stance against the parental-rights law. They admitted it! DeSantis said he signed the nuke-Reedy-Creek-bill because Disney was trying to “effectively commandeer our democratic process.” No. Disney is as entitled to say dumb things as any other person or corporation, and Moana and Ariel were not going to lead an insurrectionist march on Tallahassee. The Mouse simply did a little squeaking, got its tail stepped on, then ran into its little hole in the wainscoting. Spurred by DeSantis, Disney suddenly remembered that Republicans buy tickets to Pixar movies too.

Like everyone, DeSantis should heed the advice of Churchill: in victory, magnanimity. Using government power to reward friends and punish enemies suggests a future in which nearly half the people are being stomped on at any time. We need less polarization, not more. Neutral, nonpartisan principles should underlie governmental use of power. And billion-dollar decisions shouldn’t be made in a fit of pique. The two counties over which Disney World sprawls are yowling that they could be on the hook for billions of dollars in bond obligations. DeSantis wants to take functions such as waste management and fire protection away from a private firm that was expertly managing them and dump them on local governments that don’t want these burdens and would probably handle them worse? What am I missing?

The only hopeful detail of this odious interval is that everyone has until next June to cool off. Maybe the status quo ante will be the right answer for Reedy Creek and Florida. Maybe some modifications to the independent special district are in order. Maybe DeSantis has a genius plan for a successor district that he hasn’t shared with anyone. But at the moment, he looks like a hothead and a bully. Florida, and the U.S., need political leaders who put wise stewardship ahead of trolling.